The Brady Brief
Monthly Industry Trends & Insights from Colligo CEO Tim Brady
As records and information volumes continue to grow, organizations are also facing greater demand for fast, reliable access to that information. The pressure comes from every direction: day-to-day knowledge management and collaboration, legal and compliance requirements, audits, privacy obligations, and discovery requests.
The result is a widening gap between what organizations need to manage and the resources available to manage it.
The pressure is not just about the volume of information. Organizations are also expected to produce information faster, whether responding to internal requests, audits, legal holds, subpoenas, or court deadlines.
That pressure is only increasing as organizations push ahead with AI deployments and adoption, often without bringing records and information managers into the discussion early enough.
At the same time, records management teams are often working with fewer resources, smaller budgets, and leaner headcounts. These were common challenges we heard from records and information managers, and they came up often in conversations at the recent NAGARA Conference.
So how do we close the gap?
Technology can play a major role in closing that gap, but only when it is applied to the right problems.
A modern Electronic Document Records Management Solution (EDRMS), email management solution, archiving solution, or Microsoft Purview implementation should give teams more leverage: less manual effort, faster access to information, and better governance at scale. Used well, these technologies make information easier to find, easier to manage, and easier to govern for both business users and compliance teams.
Two areas come up again and again: getting control of email and making retention easier to apply in SharePoint. Both are good examples of how the right technology can reduce manual effort while improving governance.
Start with email
One example is an email deletion policy, a topic that came up repeatedly at the 2026 NAGARA Annual Conference. Instead of keeping everything forever, more organizations are moving toward policies that automatically purge emails older than a defined period, such as two years, on a rolling basis.
Records and information governance teams often lead this work because it reduces risk and limits the amount of unmanaged information sitting in individual mailboxes. But the policy only works if employees also have a simple way to preserve the email records or evidence that need to be kept longer. For more on this, see our webinar Email Retention & Deletion – Best Practices + Case Studies.
The benefit is shared across the organization: end users deal with less clutter in Outlook, governance teams gain a more defensible disposition process, legal teams have fewer siloed mailboxes to search during eDiscovery, and everyone benefits from cleaner, more findable records in a centralized repository. This is also a key element in any AI deployment.
Make retention easier in SharePoint
Another example is applying default retention policies automatically as documents are saved or ingested into SharePoint.
A modern lifecycle management solution such as Microsoft Purview can help by applying labels and policies at the point of ingestion, so end users do not have to interpret retention schedules on their own. That reduces friction for employees while giving records managers and information governance teams more consistent control over content from the start.
How to get IT on board
A common theme we heard in the hallways at NAGARA was that many records and information governance leaders believe in what modern technologies can do, but struggle to get IT on board.
There is no silver bullet, but we often point teams to tools such as our ROI calculator and customer case studies to help show what success can look like. Organizations that have implemented a modern SharePoint-based EDRMS often find that once the system is up and running, it feels less like an added burden and more like a better way to work.
A practical approach to bringing IT along
1. Bring IT and leadership under the tent
Rather than presenting IT with a finished decision or an alternative solution, bring them into the discussion early and work together.
Show how the approach helps the organization, reduces the burden on IT, and avoids becoming just another application to manage. Tie it in with the AI and Copilot story.
This is especially important when the solution is cloud-based, modern, and designed to work within the Microsoft environment IT already supports.
2. Build a strong business case
Show what the change will do for each stakeholder group, including end users, compliance and governance teams, legal, IT, and leadership. ROI projections, customer examples, and case studies can help make the benefits tangible.
3. Demonstrate the time savings
Time is something every stakeholder understands. If saving an email can be 10 to 15 times faster, what does that mean across thousands of emails, multiple departments, and repeated business processes? Even a small improvement per action can translate into meaningful savings at scale.
4. Talk honestly about the risks of the status quo
The other side of the business case is what happens if nothing changes: more dark data, weaker audit readiness, higher legal exposure, and greater difficulty finding the records the organization needs when it needs them.
Closing the gap does not mean asking already-stretched teams to do more with less. It means giving them better ways to manage information, reduce risk, and make governance easier for the people who have to live with it every day.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Colligo. Think of them as ‘strong opinions, loosely held.’ Proceed with curiosity and a sense of humour!